For China's Nomads, Relocation Proves a Mixed Blessing

"If we're lucky, we can get two tourists a day," she said. "Lately, we've been getting just one deal in five days."

The subsidized two-bedroom brick house Lhabu shares with her husband and three grandchildren is warm and comfortable and not too far from the town center. But in one corner, she has stored the bundled tents that are a reminder of her former nomadic life. She is not yet used to being separated from her sons and daughters and their spouses, who continue to herd livestock on faraway grasslands and come home only every 10 days.

"How can a mother not miss her children?" she said, fingering a string of beads in her left hand and admitting to occasional loneliness and financial anxiety. "In the old days, we lived in tents on our grassland. Life was harder, but at least we were together. Now we old people have to take care of ourselves."

In some communities, nomads have been allocated fenced-in land for grazing and move only from summer to winter locations. Some like the comfort of permanent housing in winter and the opportunities for better education and health care.

Dorji, from Gansu's Zhuoni county, is a nomad who has made the transition. His parents settled in a house they built themselves. Dorji went to work for an accounting company in Xiahe and now runs his own souvenir shop. "Why settle?" he said. "First, it's good for managing your livestock. If nomads live separately in the grassland, their livestock can be easily stolen. And living conditions in houses are far better than tents. Nomads sleep on the humid ground, and many suffer from arthritis when they're older."

There's one other benefit, Dorji added. "It's also good for managing people. In the past, if government officials wanted to hold a meeting, it would take a long time to inform nomads who are scattered all over. And of course, if the government senses a bad thing is going to happen, it's quite easy to mobilize forces to surround a settlement. Then nothing will happen."

Like most other Tibetans, the majority of nomads are devoted to the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader the government regards as a dangerous separatist, and there have been signs of greater official control over that devotion. "He is a religious leader worshiped by all Tibetans. He does not mention Tibetan independence," Dorji said.

"Nomads' choices should be respected. And the government should be aware of their culture traditions," said Du Fachun, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology who has studied government-led migration in Qinghai. "For example, museums should be built and their monasteries should be maintained. In the settlement areas, the temples are too few to satisfy their religious demand. To build a new temple, they need to pass very strict examinations and approval by the bureau of religious affairs. After March, those approvals became stricter."

By settling nomads into towns, officials also risk losing valuable ecological knowledge and animal husbandry skills, said Liu Shurun, a former professor at Inner Mongolia Normal University who continues to study nomadism.

Diseases are also spreading among both animals and people, because there are fewer nomads to clean up livestock waste and animals have less access to nutritious grassland, Liu said. "The grass and the animals are like a couple, you cannot separate them," Liu said. "Before, nomads were quite selfless. It was very important to help each other when they moved around and in groups. But now each family settles in one place with their own plots of land, and they don't rely on each other as much."

Liu is among a growing number of Chinese scholars who have argued that the grasslands need the regular grazing of animals to rejuvenate. Officials who have studied settlement issues said it could take 10 years to strike the right balance. But expecting nomads to protect the environment is unrealistic, they said.

"Nomads are human beings -- they also want to maximize their interest," said Tanzen Lhundup of the Beijing-based China Tibetology Research Center. "It's impossible for them to protect the environment voluntarily. So they need guidance and control. In my opinion, the first step is control."

"If we don't do this, the grasslands will continue to disappear and in the end, the nomads will still suffer. So in the end, as the Chinese saying goes, short-term suffering is better than long-term suffering," Tanzen said.

Nomadic culture will not disappear, he added. "First, not all the nomads are being moved, just some of them. Second, nobody is stopping them from carrying on their culture, their religion, their customs. They can still sing and dance."

Researchers Liu Songjie and Zhang Jie contributed to this report.